Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts

American, 1871 - 1927

(not assigned)Concord, Massachusetts, USA

SchoolAmerican Impressionism

BiographyA landscape and seascape painter, Elizabeth Roberts was the only child of wealthy Philadelphia parents. She began her art education in 1888 with Henry Rankin Poore and Elisabeth Fern Bonsall at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she won the Mary Smith Prize in 1889. That same year she went to Paris where she enrolled at the Academie Julian, studying with Jules Lefebvre. She remained in France for 10 years.

In 1898, she returned to the United States and, with her companion Grace Keyes, divided her time between New York and New England. According to John Chateauneuf, founder of "Beyond Twilight" walks of Concord, she settled in Concord, Massachusetts where she, along with Daniel Chester French and Mary Abbott, established the Concord Art Association.

The first exhibition she organized there included works by Daniel Chester French, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, and Mary Cassatt. In 1922, she hired Lois Howe, an architect, to renovate the Jonathan Ball House in Concord for a permanent home for the Association.

Roberts also spent time at West Gloucester, Massachusetts and the Cape Ann village of Annisquam. Here she produced some of her most characteristic work, serene, sunlit beach scenes with interwoven harmonious colors.

During these years, she exhibited widely including at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Society of American Artists, and the Seattle Fine Arts Society.

Roberts had suffered from Depression during most of her adult life, and in 1925, she was hospitalized for this condition. When told she had to give up painting, her despair caused her, age 55, to hang herself. She left two million dollars to her companion Grace Keyes and for the building in Concord Center to serve as a showplace for the Concord Art Association. (Source: Archives of Askart.com, , Accessed July 23, 2004)

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